Galaxy S8 Has Configurable Virtual Keys, Always-On Home Key

As you probably already know thanks to a ton of news stories out there, Samsung had introduced their new flagship smartphones today, and unlike the company’s flagships in previous years, the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus actually ship with on-screen buttons. The front-facing physical home button / fingerprint scanner was basically one of Samsung’s trademarks, the company included such a home key on pretty much every Android smartphone they released in the last couple of years. Well, the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus come with a set of virtual buttons, and the fingerprint scanner has been moved to the back. Speaking of which, those virtual keys are configurable, and the home key even comes with an always-on functionality. Sounds interesting? Well, read on.

The default key setup on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus is identical to what you’re used to on Samsung’s devices, your back key will be on the right, your multitasking key on the left, and the home key will be in between them. Now, on most Android devices, it’s the other way around, the back key is on the left, and the multitasking key on the right. In any case, it’s a good thing you can now customize those keys through settings, so if you’re coming from a non-Samsung Android phone, you can invert those keys. You can do this by accessing Settings, then navigating to Display and after that to Navigation Bar settings. Unfortunately, though, you only have two configurations to choose from, but that’s better than nothing, right? On top of that, however, you can also set a custom color for the navbar background.

Now, we’ve already mentioned that the home button is actually an always on button at the same time, this means that you can access it even if the display is off, and it is not visible. All you have to do is apply some pressure over the button (even if you can’t see it), and there you go, you’ll wake up the phone from sleep and it will throw you to the home page. Now, this part of the display is pressure sensitive, the home key area, so do keep that in mind, the rest of the display does not offer such a feature. It’s also worth nothing that you can use the hard press trick whenever you want if you’re watching a movie for example, and you’d like to go to the home screen directly, all you have to do is do a hard press on that area, and there you go. You can also customize this, if you feel like you need to apply too much pressure on it, you can tweak that, so it becomes more responsive and what not.

Kristijan has been writing for Android Headlines since 2014 and is an editor for the site. He has worked as a writer for several outlets before joining Android Headlines, and has a background in writing about Android and technology in general. He is a smartphone enthusiast that specializes in Android applications, and that platform in general. Contact him at Kristijan. [email protected]